A Pleasant Surprise

In an earlier post, we lamented about the state of our potato crop.  The plants never grew tall and lush and green as in prior years.  They had a sickly yellowish color for the entire growing season, and they never bloomed.  I drove by other gardeners' potato crops and coveted the health and vigor of their plants.  I had mentioned I have a pretty good idea that I damaged them with the application of too much chicken litter.  Too much of a good thing is detrimental, when it comes to gardening.

It was hard to fathom that I had done this to my crop after it started off so well.  When I would walk outside, I would intentionally avert my eyes from the disaster in the side yard.  Today, I told my wife, "We are going to wait until the late afternoon when the sun casts long shadows and it's a little cooler.  Then we'll harvest what we can from the potatoes.

We started digging with a digging fork.  It's like a pitch fork, but with wide prongs.  It easily digs into the soil.  We lift the plant from the loosened soil and red potatoes dangle from the roots.  These potatoes are the LaSoda variety.  A variety that does well here.

We have a forty foot row in the side yard that I have planted with four plants per row all the way down.  In all, I had 122 potato plants.  They were mulched deep with wood chips to retain soil moisture and prohibit weed competition.  It also aids in mitigating soil compaction.  We worked our way down the row in the late afternoon.  The potatoes weren't plentiful, but they were better than I had anticipated.

At the end of the row, we had a decent amount in the wagon.

If the plants had been healthy, no telling how much we could have produced.  Most plants had two potatoes.  Some had only one and some had as many as five.

I decided I would weigh them.  First I weighed the empty bucket.  It was 2 pounds.  Then I filled the bucket with potatoes and weighed them and subtracted the weight of the empty bucket.  

When I had finished weighing, we had a grand total of 49 pounds of potatoes on 122 plants.  That's almost a half pound of potatoes per plant.  I googled and found that the average yield should be between 1 and 5 pounds per plant.  So a rather dismal harvest, BUT we choose to look on the bright side.  We thought we weren't going to get ANY!

I put them on the curing rack.  They are in the shade and under a fan on wire mesh (hardware cloth).  I'll leave them here for about 10 days and then I'll bring them inside and store them in the dark.

Next year, I promise to be more reserved in my use of chicken litter for fertilizer.  I'm thinking about taking a soil test as well.  We'll see if we can improve the yield next year over this year.